12 December 2008 - 20 December 2008
Dec 12, the last day of term, I departed with 175 of my LSE peers for the slopes of Tignes in the French Alps. I had only a few qualms upon departure, namely: would my knee hold up? Am I going to go insane, living with 3 Scandanavian girls - Trine, Anna, and Kim - for a week? Did I forget my toothbrush? Lucky for me, all of them proved unfounded and I had an absolutely amazing time, truly one of the best weeks of my life.
We left LSE at around 8:00pm on 12 December in coach busses - 4 of them. Ours was not full so it was a little more comfortable I'm sure, but it was only 15 minutes into our ride that we encountered difficulties. A posh lady in a BMW Z4 tried to squeeze through a narrow turn on the side of the bus and we crunched her. The damage wasn't bad enough to keep us there for a long time... but apparently she had some heart condition and went into nervous shock, requiring nearly 10, yes 10, advanced medical personnel to assist her. Perhaps it was just a boring day for the medics. In any case, it took nearly 2 hours to get everything sorted out. Needless to say, 3 hours later when we arrived in Dover, we had missed our ferry and had to wait in line with the seemingly endless rows of coaches - also filled with English university students going on ski holiday - for quite some time, but finally we boarded the gigantic boat and set off for the land of the Frogs.
The ferry itself gave me an impression of what the rest of the trip was going to be like. Everyone immediately began consuming copious amounts of alcohol, taunting other schools with English chants/songs (which are rather entertaining) and just generally getting out of hand. I saw one guy chug an entire bottle of wine. It was disgusting. I think he spewed it all back up about 5 minutes later but I didn't care to wait and see it. All in all, it was probably the least comfortable hour and a half between 3:00am-4:30am I have ever spent, sitting in awful plastic chairs and withstanding 10 foot swells. But we made it to France safely and were on our way.
Much of the next....13 hours was spent sleeping, with a brief stop at a grocery store before arriving at the chalet. We got there in the evening, and it was beginning to snow - what would be only the first of 3 days of blizzard-like conditions. Getting into the chalet was a pain: more waiting around and in the cold. Finally, we got into our room and much to our pleasant surprise, had cooking facilities and a small but workable dining area. This, I'm sure, saved us countless Euros because, like any skiier knows, food prices in a ski resort are exorbitant. We visited the supermarket nearly every night and bought more than enough bread, cheese, and wine to keep us sufficiently fed and drunk all week. And it was all cheap as dirt. Fabulous.
The first few days of skiing were pretty weak. Like I said, it was blizzarding like crazy so they only opened 2 lifts in our village for the first three days, which isn't exactly a large amount of area to ski. Fortunately, because it was damn near impossible to see further than 10 feet in front of your face, even skiing those two slopes over and over again was a remarkable adventure. Anna and I thought it would be a great idea to try the off-piste (off-trail in American lingo) run through some rocky areas and an hour and a half later, snow everywhere, we emerged swearing never to do it again. So we kept ourselves occupied for a few hours of the day.
This was probably the best opportunity for us to drink at night, because the skiing wasn't too great in the day, and we made the best of it. Each night, a ski club rep would come to our room and explain to us the planned festivities for the night. LSE would all convene at the same bar, drink for a while, and then reconvene at a club later on. It actually worked out quite well, considering there were 7-8 other English unis at the same resort and we really didn't know the other LSE kids, much less the other Englishmen. I think what made it easy to identify between the groups was A) the awful awful English accents that other university students seemed to have, without fail, as opposed to the fairly proper accent by comparison, and B) the fancy-dress themes.
I think it's appropriate at this point to explain something about English party culture. Whereas Americans enjoy drinking heavily and going out and having a good time every weekend - sometimes dressing up for toga parties or semi-formals (and indeed, we take Halloween very seriously), the English, more times than not, find a reason (or no reason at all) to wear "fancy dress." This is usually themed - our themes for the week were 'West Coast Gangsters, Spandex, Rubix Cube, and Santa' - and everyone puts on silly clothes... and THEN get drunk. It's really quite silly to see people walking around London with fancy dress on the weekend evenings. It's even MORE silly to see nearly 500 English university students walking around drunk in the snow in a quaint French skiing village with facepaint, spandex, wigs, school girl costumes, ski goggles, etc. This is exactly what happened, every single night, at Tignes. You could easily determine which university someone belonged to based on what they were wearing past 8:00pm. Some even wore their costumes on the slopes, but it was cold and I wouldn't have recommended it.
Finally, the weather cleared up a few days into the trip and we got to explore the mountain. It was huge and the skiing reminded me a lot of Vail but without the trees. It also had been snowing for 3 days straight so the powder was fresh, deep, and untouched. It was actually perfect conditions, and I was ecstatic. I can't really describe the skiing itself, it was just amazing. I did get overzealous a few times and had some spectacular falls, but luckily each time someone was waiting in front of me and got to witness the carnage. Miraculously I didn't hurt anything, except my pride. But that's easily mended.
The starkest difference between the skiing in the Alps and in the States had nothing to do with the actual skiing. In the Alps, there are a number of small villages, each with lifts going to different peaks, and each with their own chalets, shops, bars, and restaurants. The cool thing is that they're all part of the same resort, so you can ski in and out of them, from one to another to the next. It was really nice, I thought, to ski clear across the resort to one of the smaller and less accessible resorts to have lunch, and then ski back to our village - the furthest away on the other side of the resort - before the lifts closed. This was exactly what happened one of the days, and we had some great French Onion Soup and some cheese dish that were to die for. Also, the waitress was the most beautiful person I have ever seen, and also very nice... I fell in love at first sight. Amazing.
In addition to our travels around Tignes, there was another entire resort within skiing distance of ours called Val D'Iseire so we upgraded our passes for a few Euros one day and headed over there for more untouched powder and excellent runs. The main reason for our visit was because we had heard, through our new friends, that there was an excellent Apres Ski bar on the side of the mountain.
Apres Ski, or After Ski, is an essential part of the skiing experience. When you're done skiing, it is completely unnecessary and indeed frowned upon to trek all the way to your room. The proper procedure is to congregate at a bar or pub and enjoy live music and happy hour deals for a few hours. This may seem like a stupid idea after not having eaten since lunch and dehydrating yourself skiing all day, but it is actually fun enough to offset the undesirable affects.
Anyway, this particular Apres Ski bar was actually a mid-mountain lodge. We visited for lunch to check out the spot and it looked quite fun. Later in the day, after having traversed the whole of Val D'Iseire, we were making our way back to the lodge on a lift and could hear, from quite far away, the thump of the bass at the bar. They were pumping mad beats, with a live DJ and even a live singer for a few songs. The bar was actually outside - they put the drinks in snow drifts to keep them cold. Because it was goddamn freezing outside, and the tables outside was where the party was, everyone was forced to start dancing, in order to keep warm. So now everyone is dancing and drinking... naturally, the next step would be dancing on the tables. In ski boots. And shirtless. Unfortunately, we were under the impression the party had just started, and were beginning to get buzzed enough to venture a trip to the top of our table when they turned the music off. Apparently they're not legally allowed to keep the party running past dusk because of the danger that could pose to our physical being, so they kicked everyone out at 5.
Let me tell you, skiing down the mountain, slightly drunk, in quickly fading and finally nonexistant light.... AWESOME. It actually was a lot of fun. We didn't HAVE to ski down - they kept the gondola open - but we did anyway because it's a great story to tell and now I'm telling it! We went very slow, and lots of laughs and jokes, but definitely a great experience and well worth upgrading our lift tickets for the day.
The next day was the last full day of Tignes action, so I skiied with some other friends for the day. On the last run, of the last day, at nearly the bottom of the slope, I re-injured my knee. I suppose it's my own fault because I went off-piste by myself to get some last knee deep powder runs and ended up skiing into a cloud, hitting a rock or something and crossing my skis. But I was close enough to the bottom where I could safely make my way straight into the bar where I found Trine and Anna so it worked out perfectly.
That evening was the last, and the ski club officers had a special event planned in which they "awarded" drinking "fines" to people for funny stories that happened. All week the officers had been giving out free drinks for one thing or another, and this time they got a microphone and made people drink for embarrassing stories they were involved in. There were only a few really good stories, but it was a fun idea. I got fined for passing out (only slightly inebriated) at 9pm one night. Luckily I only had to take a shot of Jaegermeister - some people were given dirty pints or had to chug things or funnel or what have you. So I got off easy.
Later, after having taken some time to rest, I went to the club with just about everyone else from LSE and got wild and crazy until about 3:30 when I think I fell asleep. My goal had been to stay away until we boarded the coaches to the airport at 4am, but alas! I failed, but only just. The coaches were fully boarded a bit behind schedule... maybe around 6:45, and we spent an ungodly amount of time in the Geneva Int'l Airport, but finally arrived back in London the evening of 20 December.
It was a fantastic trip on the whole - awesome skiing, great nights out, and most importantly, I made a whole bunch of new friends, most of them English, whom I hope to continue good times with in the future. Unfortunately I couldn't find the waitress in Les Brevieres (that village we had lunch in) so I couldn't ask her to marry me, but one day I'll go back. One day...
I'm off to Prague, Vienna, and Budapest tomorrow, so I wish all 1.5 of my loyal readers a very Happy New Year in 2009, and hopefully I won't wait 3 months before writing my next post like last time.
Au revoir!
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